Thank you for your response and helpful questions! I’ll gladly provide more details.
Archive Location:
The archive is intended to be a separate list within a subsite in SharePoint, which will hold the archived items on a monthly basis. The reason for archiving to a separate list is to prevent the main list from growing too large and to help with performance, as the list is currently growing at a very high volume due to frequent updates and new items being added.
Why Archive Rather Than Locking Down:
While I understand the option of using retention labels to lock down records, the archiving requirement is more about reducing the active list's size to improve performance, especially since the list is filling up so rapidly. The goal is to keep the active list more manageable by periodically moving older items (which are no longer actively used) to an archive, rather than keeping them in the main list or locking them in place.
Retention labels are a great option for legal hold purposes, but in my case, archiving to a separate list (and storing it in a subsite) helps better manage the growing volume of data and ensures that we can preserve performance. Plus, archiving the items into a separate list allows us to still access them for historical purposes without impacting the speed and accessibility of the current list.
Handling Lookup Fields:
A critical aspect of this archiving process is ensuring that the lookup columns are archived along with their values. For this, we want to make sure that when an item is moved to the archive list, all lookup field values are captured correctly and preserved. This is essential because we need the full context of the archived items, including their references to other lists. I'm exploring how best to store this lookup data within the archived records, either as individual columns or in a key-value format (or possibly another approach).
Microsoft 365 Archive and Site Archiving:
While Microsoft 365 Archive (which archives the whole site) is an interesting option, it's not quite suitable in this case. The site will still be in use after archiving the list items, and I need the archived records to remain accessible for reference and reporting without locking down the entire site. I’m also concerned about retaining the lookup relationships when archiving at the site level, as it may not be as straightforward to maintain those references.
Summing Up:
To recap:
- The list is growing rapidly due to high-volume inbound data.
- I want to move data on a monthly basis to a different subsite list for performance reasons.
- The challenge is capturing lookup field values properly in the archive to ensure the integrity and context of the data.
Does this help clarify the scenario? Would love to hear if anyone has implemented something similar or if there are any other approaches I should consider!
Thanks again!
